Night Creatures Page 5

  A dozen people served them: merchants from Damascus and Baghdad brought them cloths the like of which were seldom seen in Europe; scores of dark-eyed Syrians were at their instant call; courteous Arabs and sleek Greeks had taught them prosody, philosophy, and rhetoric. They spoke—and read and wrote—French, Arabic, Latin, and Greek with easy interchangeability.

  As they mounted the first range of foothills young Gaussin touched the gold-bossed bridle of his saddlemate. ‘Wilt tarry beneath the trees with me a while, Sylv’ette?’ he asked. ‘There is somewhat I would say to thee.’

  The girl looked at him, smiling, and drew her Arab pacer’s rein. A moment later, as their friends rode down into the farther valley, they walked their horses to the grove of flowering almond trees and Gaussin leaped down from his saddle to take the girl’s slim foot in his hand and assist her to dismount.

  Since Adam first looked into Eve’s eyes there has been no woman in creation who could not tell when she was about to receive the offer of a man’s devotion, and the telegraph of Eros warned Sylvanette de Gavaret. A flush as delicate as the almond blossoms overhead spread up her throat, across her cheeks, and on her high, white brow. She looked at him, eyes wide, lips parted; she was breathing faster as he took her hand, slipped off the pearl-sewn gauntlet, and kissed her fingers.

  No chevalier’s kiss this, no mere salute of gallantry, but homage, worship utter and complete as that of worshipper before a shrine.

  ‘Sylv’ette ma drue!’ he paraphrased the Arthurian romance, ‘Sylv’ette ma mie, en vous ma mort, en vous ma vie! (Sylvette my little bird, Sylvette my dear, in you my death, in you my life).’

  Her eyes were soft with love and trust as she laid her other hand upon his crisply curling auburn hair and capped the verse in a voice scarcely louder than a fluttering breath:

  ‘Bel ami, ainsi, va de nous!

  Ne vous sans moi, ni moi sans vous!

  Fair love, let us together be,

  Not thou sans me, nor I sans thee!’

  He looked up, wondering incredulity in his eyes. ‘Lovest thou me, then, Sylv’ette?’

  ‘With all the heart of me, my Gaussin.’

  Time and life are one, eternity is different, immeasurable; and eternity, though but an instant clipped from time’s relentless dial, was theirs as they exchanged their first kiss. He drew her to him slowly, unbelievingly, and the utterness of her sweet self-surrender was almost terrifying as she leant against him, lips apart, and offered him a kiss that shook him to the final cell and fiber of his being. She groaned softly, as in pain, went flaccid in his arms, then tightened her arms round his shoulders, pulling his face down to hers, pressing against him until he felt the flutter of her heart as it beat echoes to the pounding of his pulses.

  Afterwhiles they sat beneath the almond trees on a net of spangled shade, the coiling fronds of the new grasses cool against their hands. The delicate odor of the almond blossoms came to them, and the warm scent of fern-grass. Beneath its overtone of pink, with the verdure of the sward below, and the bright blue of anemones to punctuate it, the orchard might have been a fragment of the Magic Carpet of the Arab story-tellers, torn off and drifted here to light among the foothills of the Lebanons.

  At noon they rose to their knees and, hands joined piously, recited the sweet salutation of the angel to the Blessed Mother while the bells of half a hundred churches, and the chapels of the Templars and the Hospitalers, and the convents of the nuns and friars rang the angelus. Afterward they broke their fast with pasties of spiced meat and comfits washed down with Cyprian wine, and washed their hands in a small brook that clattered over pebbles round and smooth as doves’ eggs. Then she must lave her white feet in the brooklet, and he must be her tiring-woman and her body-servant and dry them on the linen of his mantle, and claim a kiss from both her insteps for the service, and a mailed and bearded knight from the Hospital, as he rode by on his high black charger, smiled at them as he heard their laughter, then wiped a tear-drop from his eye. But he could not tell if he wept for them because they were so young and inexperienced, or for himself, because he had neither youth nor illusions left.

  At last the soft blue dusk of early evening settled in the valleys. They rose, and while he put the harness on the horses she watched him with love-brightened eyes. A lovely creature, this Sylvanette de Gavaret. Just turned sixteen, and lissome as a willow withe, she made each movement with a sort of lilting, questing eagerness. There was lyric loveliness in every motion of her long and supple body, in the undulation of her narrow hips, the rondure of her high firm breasts. An Arab ancestress had willed her the black hair that in some lights seemed to have an iridescence like a blackbird’s throat and the great dark eyes, soft and appealing as a gazelle’s, with something hesitant in their velvet depths. But the long, slim lines of her, the fair white skin through which a delicate tracery of blue veins showed and to which no sun, however ardent, could bring a touch of tan, were heritages of pure Norman blood. Brought up in Outremer, child of the mingled customs of East and West, she dyed the almond-shaped nails of her hands and feet bright red with henna and emphasized the depth and power of her great dark eyes by shadowing their lace-veined lids with kohl.

  The shimmer of her silken tunic was like the pale bloom of her skin, something that belonged to her, and no one else, and the dark amethysts of her ear-rings, like the amaranthine jewels of her necklace and the great carved amethystine signet on her forefinger, seemed to echo the soft somberness that hid the inward glow of her fringed, plumbless eyes.

  She shuddered slightly, as if stricken with a sudden chill as he led up the bridled Arab barbs. ‘Art cold, my sweetling?’ he asked with a lover’s solicitude.

  ‘Nay, love of mine,’ she answered with a smile that brought the hidden fires of her deep eyes to sudden glowing. ‘’Tis that I hate to say farewell to this dear spot. Would that we might be like this alway, have this one day frozen into an eternity.’

  He laughed and kissed her as he swung her to the saddle. ‘’Tis but the dawning of our day of love, yah Shadjar ad Darr—O Pearl-Spray’—he used the Arabic love-term as naturally as if he had been born beneath the shadow of the Crescent. ‘As good Queen Balkis said to Solomon the Great, “The half hath not been told thee”.’

  He broke into a snatch of song as they rode down the highway and dipped into the purple-shadowed valley: the romance of Bisclavret penned by Marie de France for the pleasuring of English Henry:

  ‘Bisclavret a nun en Bretan

  Garulf l’apelent li Norman . . .’

  ‘The Bretons call it Bisclavret,

  In Normandy they say Garulf, in England werewolf . . .’

  ‘Ah, no, my love, sing not that frightening ditty, I entreat thee!’ Sylvanette signed herself fearfully and looked about her with a shudder. ‘The werewolf is a devil-creature to affright the hardiest, and we are far from home——’

  ‘O thou sweet small coward,’ he laughed teasingly, ‘art thou truly frighted of the werewolf while I ride thus beside thee?’

  ‘Nay,’ she answered with an echoing smile, ‘not truly. But the bisclavret affrights me sore. In all the host of Pandemonium there is no monster like unto the werewolf, methinks. By’r Lakin, I chill from heart to skin at very mention of its name! I cannot bide a wolf-pelt nigh me, since it reminds me of the hateful loup-garou [werewolf].’

  They trotted through the vaulted portal of the tower-gate under echoing walls that picked up the sound of their horses’ hooves and hurled them back with thunderous volume, and came into the street beyond. In the evening cool the city was astir. Beneath striped canopies of sail-cloth, Syrian merchants spread their stocks of rugs from Mosul, glass from Damascus, linen sewn with pearls from far Baghdad, jeweled saddle-cloths from Shamakha, carpets from Bokhara vivid as a hasheesh-eater’s dream.

  Upon the Square stood the Cathedral, first a church and then a mosque and now again a church, staunch with the trinity of its great oaken doors and Gothic strength, vivid with the glow of sanct
us light and candle, calm now, and quiet, as if it dreamt of peace amid a world still echoing with the clash of arms and battle-cries and shuddering under rumors of new wars.

  Here she bade him leave her, for he must report at the citadel before the evening angelus had rung, and afterward he must bespeak her father for her hand, while she would fain kneel at the altar of the good Saint Anne and ask her intervention when the landless knight besought the heiress of de Gavaret for wife.

  He looked back with a wave as she went up the steps, and she turned to him, white hands held out in farewell, eyes upraised and very wide. A sudden gust of evening breeze pressed her silk robe against her body, defining it as though it were a statue suddenly released from the rough marble, and she raised her hands and pressed them to her breast and leant herself toward him. With lips apart and eyes tight closed, she leaned toward him, then turned and made her way with slow steps through the shadowy ravine of the great door. At the threshold she stopped for a moment, wound her scarf of tabby silk turbanwise about her head, then tiptoed to the niche in the north transept where the altar of the blessed Anne of Bethlehem was set.

  The evening shadows had grown deeper when she emerged from the great church. Little feathers of dusk were drifting through the streets; a sort of brassy, unreal twilight filled the air. She tossed a groat to the small half-caste boy who held her horse, swung the barb around so she might mount the saddle from the horse-block at the curb, but paused with foot upraised as a little scream of almost human agony came to her. She looked about. Nowhere, either in the Square or in the streets debouching on it was there any sign of life. Then the scream came again, and she looked into the shadow cast by a buttress of the cathedral wall and saw a filthy, ragged figure squatting.

  Bridle looped in elbow, she approached the crouching form. It was a woman, brown of face and wrinkled as a frosted apple. Her cloak was patched and quilted with a dozen different-colored scraps of rag, and round her neck and on her filthy, scrawny hands were ornaments of tarnished metal. Between her knees she held a writhing, quivering jackdaw at which she mouthed with toothless gums.

  ‘What saith my lord the Count, thou imp of Satan?’ she demanded. ‘Did not I send thee to his tower to overhear his counsel with the Master of the Templars? Tell me that which passed between them, or by Barran-Sathanas I’ll pluck thee bare as any pigeon ready for the pastry-cook!’

  ‘Let be!’ Sylvanette commanded very sharply. ‘How darest thou, in the very shadow of God’s house——’

  Her brave words slackened, faltered, for the old crone raised her wrinkle-puckered face and looked at her with fixed, set, staring eyes, void of expression as if they were set in a corpse’s face. Yet in the dark they seemed somehow to glow with inward phosphorescence, like the pale light given off by long-dead things that rot in swamps and quagmires.

  ‘And who are thou to give directions to thy betters, wench?’ the crone demanded. ‘Pass on, or feel the vengeance of La Crainte——’

  ‘Wench?’ Fury drove all fear from Sylvanette. ‘Thou darest call me wench, thou foul harpy?’ She brought her riding-whip down on the rag-patched shoulders of the crouching hag. ‘That for thy insolence! Unloose yon poor bird instantly, or——’

  Once more her voice failed, for the old woman was addressing her in a low, squeaky whisper: ‘How long wilt thou continue in the form of a woman, wretched creature?’ She rose, drew a flask from her girdle, and from it poured a little liquor in the palm of her cupped hand. ‘Take the form I give thee’—she hurled the liquid into Sylvanette’s face—‘and retain it till’—she rose and brought her withered, wrinkled lips against Sylvanette’s ear, whispered something in a tittering, malicious breath, then slapped the girl on both cheeks with her open hand.

  The liquor the old hag had thrown in her face stung like vitriol, scalding Sylvanette on brow and cheek and chin. The fire of it seemed spreading through her veins until she felt as if she were bound to the stake with blazing faggots heaped about her. The world was spinning crazily on a loose axis; time stopped, and breathing with it. She was gasping, choking, dying. She dropped upon her knees, then to her hands. The scarf wound round her head fell uncoiled to the pavement; her gown and shoes and gauntlets hung and flapped about her. An itching, tingling and unendurable as nettle-stings, spread over her entire body. Her eyes stung so she could not wink without sharp, stabbing pains in them. She raised a hand to soothe her smarting lids. . . . O, mercy, heaven! No hand, this, but a broad furry paw, long-nailed and terrible—a wolf’s foot!

  She screamed in horror and dismay. ‘Woo-hoo-oo-oo-hoo!’ Deep-throated, rising in a slow crescendo, then sinking from a howl to a wail, and from a wail to a low moan, the ululation of a wolf’s bay sounded eerily, and from every kennel in the city came an answering chorus, yelps, growls, barks of dogs which answered the long howl with fear or fury.

  ‘Begone!’ The witch spurned her. ‘Go seek thy kind, and’—a high, cruel, cackling laugh—‘remember how thou mayest find release!’

  Panic seized her. Home! She must get home, see the good Père Botron, have this foul witchery taken off with bell and book and holy water. With long, swift, silent leaps she raced along the darkling street, but somehow the quick summer darkness which had settled on the city seemed less dense. The horologe had struck the sunset hour long since, lights were glowing in the windows of the houses, here and there a cresset burned against a wall; but the darkness seemed no more than a deep twilight as she loped with long, swift, space-devouring leaps toward the Château Gavaret.

  She was almost at the portal now. At the gate stood Guilhen, sergeant of the watch, leaning on his partizan, gazing with indifferent eyes at a cat that stalked imaginary mice in the shadows. She made toward him as to a shelter in a tempest. ‘Guilhen, old fellow, it is I!’ she attempted to cry, but:

  ‘Woo-hoo-oo-oo-hoo!’ a wolf’s howl split the gathering darkness.

  ‘Saint Mary’s mercy on all sinners!’ Guilhen almost let fall his partizan at sight of the great beast that rushed toward him. Almost, but not quite. In a moment he had gathered back his wits and aimed a devastating blow at the brute. ‘Wolf or demon, natural creature or bisclavret, have at thee!’ he shouted. Then, to the guard within the château: ‘Ho, there, a wolf runs in the streets! Bring bows to shoot it down!’

  ‘Guilhen, Guilhen, ’tis I, the Lady Sylvanette ensorcelled by foul witchcraft!’ the wretched girl screamed, but only horrid growls and marrow-chilling howls came from her mouth.

  Now a twanging like a plucked harp-string sounded, and an arrow clipped against the pavement by her feet, and a quarrel from a crossbow struck fire from the paving-stones behind her.

  She turned and ran for dear life, for the guard was turning out, and the arrows screamed and whistled past her ears like hornets when their nest is disturbed.

  Through the streets she ran, the clicking of her nails against the paving-flints in time with the wild beating of her heart. Now she was at the gate of Saint George. The great valves had been closed but the postern still swung open to admit late travelers.

  ‘Ho, there!’ a porter cried. ‘A wolf comes; close the gate, ’twill yield a noble pelt!’

  He seized the chain to draw the postern shut, but like a driven arrow she sped past him, out upon the moon-washed highway toward the foothills of the Lebanons whence two hours earlier she and Gaussin had ridden.

  Panic raced beside her and fear ran at her heels as she swept along the road until she reached the orchard-plot where she and Gaussin had exchanged their vows. There she sank whimpering on the grass, her sides expanding and contracting with her tortured breathing. Her throat was burning, parched and dry with dust. She rose wearily and went to the brook where she had waded after noonday meat. The moon shone on a little pool of still water as she bent thirstily above it, and she shrank back, sick with fright and horror. In the mirror of the brooklet she had seen herself—her broad face gray-furred, eyes green and glowing in the moonlight, white fangs agleam, long pink tongue lolling
from a black-lipped mouth.

  In bitterness and agony of spirit she wept, and the long-drawn, eery belling of a wolf’s howl sounded through the night: ‘Woo-hoo-oo-oo-hoo!’

  Gaussin de Sollies was making a meticulously careful toilet. In almost feverish haste he replaced the woolen hose and doublet with silk garments, and in place of the white linen surtout drew a mantle of fine damask over his small-clothes.

  He buckled a gold-studded belt about his waist and lashed a light curved cimeter to it with a gold chain. Finally he dashed rose water upon his hair and beard and clapped a velvet cap upon his curling red-gold hair.

  He was asking much when he demanded Sylvanette de Gavaret for wife, he realized, but as he looked into the Byzantine mirror of polished silver he knew that he had much to offer.

  Not in lands and gear—the good Lord knew otherwise!—but in person, and certainly in prospects. He had traveled far and fast. While most youths of his age were still serving as squires, he had worn the golden spurs of knighthood almost four years, and yet he had just passed his twenty-second birthday.

  Godson—some said love-child—of the Bishop Gilles de Saucier, he had been reared in the episcopal palace at Tyre, learning all one destined for the church should know, and many things a cleric had no right to think of. In his fourteenth year his patron died, but he had made good friends who saw him placed in service with the Warden of Antioch, where he straightway left all thoughts of robe and tonsure and addressed himself so aptly to the arts of war that before he reached his sixteenth year he had been made a captain, and in his eighteenth summer had won knighthood for bravery in the field. Two years’ captivity in Cairo had made him well-nigh as familiar with the Paynim soldiery as his own, and despite his youth he was as welcome at the council table as he was at the head of his troop of mounted men-at-arms. Red-haired, blue-eyed, and ruddy-faced, he was pure Norman to his fingertips, but Norman overlaid with Eastern culture, and with his forthright Frankish nature tempered and diluted with a subtlety that came from long association with the Greek and Arab. A man who had come far in a short time and would go farther, this; no maiden’s father need reproach him for his lack of lands, those would surely come with ripening age, and meantime he could offer youth and strength and ardent love.